I think people are over-intellectualizing this and assuming there has to be some mechanical or economic incentive behind high-level players griefing low-level zones - "Maybe it's for disenchanting mats - nerf it!", "Maybe they need trade skill drops!", "Maybe they're farming skill-ups!". Sure, sometimes those will be true. But I think people are missing the much more obvious reality of what happens in "soft PvP" systems, especially in old-school MMORPG environments - A lot of players will do it simply because they can, and because negatively impacting other players becomes its own form of entertainment.
That's not even me being cynical. It's just observable MMO behavior going back decades. This is exactly what I've been talking about for months in all the debates surrounding instancing, open-world competition, contested camps, and "community-driven" friction in "EQ-likes". There's this romanticized idea that heavy player interdependence and contested spaces naturally create meaningful social dynamics. Sometimes they do. But they also create environments where a subset of players derive enjoyment specifically from exerting dominance, denying access, wasting other people's time, or psychologically controlling shared spaces. And importantly, they don't need loot incentives to justify it. The incentive is the disruption itself.
People underestimate how much MMO behavior is psychological rather than reward-driven. In highly social online games, power expression becomes content. Being able to lock down a camp, train people, monopolize a spawn, or make lower-level players miserable becomes a way for certain players to feel influential inside the world. That's why I've always thought the "players will self-regulate" argument was completely naive. Historically, they don't - or in "soft pvp" environments have no/little ability to do so.
The irony is that a lot of these systems are defended under the banner of "community," but hostile friction often damages community more than it creates it. There's a massive difference between organic social interaction and systems that encourage territorial behavior. This is also why I think modern MMOs need to be much more careful about how they implement open-world competition. Not because players should never interact negatively, but because developers consistently underestimate how efficiently players will weaponize inconvenience against one another once the novelty wears off.
Games like EQ got away with more of this because online worlds themselves were novel and players tolerated enormous amounts of friction for the social experience alone. In 2026, players are far less patient with systems where large portions of their session can be invalidated by a handful of bored high-level players deciding to "have fun" at everyone else's expense.
